Have You Heard the One About President Joe Biden?

That's No Joke. Consider: He is the most quietly effective politician in D.C. (Don't laugh.) The "Most Influential Vice President in History." (Seriously, stop laughing.) One of our nation's most senior statesmen. (Look it up!) So why is the man who could be the next president also the butt of so many jokes? Jeanne Marie Laskas gets to know the most misunderstood man in Washington

Keep going straight here," Joe Biden says. We've been at this for hours, climbing in and out of the SUV to look at stuff, a water tower, a stone wall, the house where the most beautiful girl in the world lived, hoagies, Herman the German's gas station, Meyers-eats-tires tire shop, the house where another most beautiful girl in the world lived, and he's holding up better than the rest of us. He never winces, has no achy knees, no lower-back anything, neck, joints; for the guy rockin' the Ray-Ban aviators, 70 is the new 60. "Wait, there's Little Italy down there," he says, peering out the window. "A lot of great Italian restaurants. If there's anybody down there who doesn't vote for me, I haven't found them yet. But I will. I will.

"Okay, in the interest of time, we'll stop here. Let's get out here."

It's his old street. His house. Small white brick. Black shutters. Cement path. A perfectly average 1950s American neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware, now with a motorcade parked along Wilson Road and Secret Service guys swarming and the vice president of the United States wandering, leading fast. "Hi there," he says to a guy with a leaf blower. "I lived here for twenty years. Mack? Hey, Mack. I'm Joe. You're living in a house a guy named Kenny Horn used to live in. Kenny Horn.

"Okay, the driveway, watch yourself. So this is the house. That was my bedroom. I lived there with my brothers Jimmy, Frankie, and my Uncle Ed. One bureau, four drawers, everybody got a drawer. My sister, the princess Valerie, had her own room. Which was ten by twelve. But she deserved it. And my dad took great pride in having that barbecue pit." He circles the house, heads to the back door. "I wish I knew who lived here, because I would show you my room."

Uncle Ed, they called him Uncle Boo-Boo. Brilliant guy. Sprawling intellect. He stuttered. Way worse than Biden stuttered as a boy, which was bad enough. Uncle Boo-Boo never got past it. Never married. Dud job. Drank. Drank a lot. He served as an example of what could happen if you didn't rehearse, didn't practice getting your mouth unstuck. Biden has never had a drink.

"Oh, what the hell." He charges up to the back door, knocks. "Hello? Hello?" We stand on the back deck, waiting. Two Secret Service guys have their backs to us, stationed like owls by the picket fence.

He wants to be the best vice president ever," staffers told me, months ago, when I first started spending time with Joe Biden. That was all the talk last winter. Hillary would almost certainly be the nominee, not Biden, they said, whenever the 2016 issue came up, which wasn't often. But then, abruptly, Biden's stock started steeply rising, at least in the eyes of the public. Washington had been hyperventilating about the fiscal cliff, and Obama sent Biden in to broker a deal. Then came the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Obama sent Biden out to rally the public, Biden in to reason with Congress, Biden over to talk to the NRA. In 2013, Biden has emerged increasingly more visibly potent than his boss. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL VICE PRESIDENT IN HISTORY? one headline proffered.

"Well, he would be crazy not to keep his options open," staffers started saying then, whenever the 2016 issue came up. Which still wasn't often. The parlor game was not my reason for being there. I wanted to get to know Biden. I wanted to understand why "President Joe Biden" has such a preposterous ring to it, and I wanted to know if he knew it did.

There's a joke. Something fundamentally comical. That's where the public starts with Biden. I recognized it in Rome, when I traveled with him to the pope's inauguration. He was meeting with friends, presidents from across the globe. Because Joe Biden has been at this so long, don't forget, that he is the stuff of middle-school civics exams. I saw him freelance a grand Joe Biden entrance into President Giorgio Napolitano's palace, teeth gleaming, arms fully outstretched, ready to hug this guy, that guy, Hey, guys! I'm here! You're here! We're beautiful! Decked out in his smooth blue suit, white pocket square—his broad smile the kind a man reserves for his bowling team. This demeanor contrasted sharply with everyone else's. Guards in shiny helmets sprouting horsehair ponytails, bedraggled White House advance team in smart skirts and solid-color pumps. A Biden entrance can make the stuffiest event intimate, for an instant human and vaguely...funny.

Sunshine, apt and miraculous, broke through the day of the pope's installation Mass. "Your Holiness, this is my sister, Valerie," Biden said. The pope. Joe Biden and the pope. Val was next to him in her long black chapel veil, the two of them together at church just like back in Wilmington, and Scranton before. Except it was the Vatican. In the reception line, Val didn't kiss the pope's ring, and Biden didn't kiss the pope's ring (to be fair, plenty of people didn't kiss the pope's ring), because they are Bidens, equal, not below or above anyone, not the pope, not some schlub on the street. "Nobody is better than you." That's the message their mom hammered into their heads. "You're not better than anybody, but nobody is better than you."

JOE BIDEN DOESN'T KISS UP TO ANYONE, international headlines read later that day, which made it sound way more hostile than his mom ever meant it.

Then an image was tweeted, and for a time retweeted, a picture of Biden in the crowd of worshippers outside Saint Peter's Basilica during the holiest Mass of the twenty-first century. The photo is jammed with faces, Biden in the center of them all. Plenty have on sunglasses. But Biden has on his signature Ray-Bans—the aviators!—and that was what, above all else about his whirlwind trip to Rome, was inexplicably spectacular.

Vice fucking president of the United States. You get the feeling Joe Biden would love to put it that way, to stand in a crowd of thousands in his aviators and say, "Yo, I'm the vice fucking president of the United States, y'all." Which he has never said. But you think he might. That's what's funny. It's a comfort level, and a mocking, and a kind of affection wrapped warmly into a knowing joke. Joe Biden. The tipsy uncle who actually doesn't drink. He's always dancing there on the edge of embarrassment. He's that guy. He might put a lampshade on his head.

It's odd, probably, that the vice president of the United States is wandering around like this, trying to get in the room he slept in when he was 10. But here we are. "You can see the old porch, Shailagh, see it?" Shailagh Murray is his communications director, a former Washington Post political reporter—she's Irish, she's Catholic, she gets him, he loves her. "This deck wasn't here," he says. "Oh, I used to come out here and put pebbles in my mouth, try to shout against that wall. One of the ways I tried..." Tried to learn to speak without his face freezing up.

He knocks again. "I guess they're not home." He peers through the back window. "Take a look at the dining room, Shailagh. The china closet against the wall? See how the wall comes out a little bit? Val would hide in there. Reach out with a wet glove when I came in late so I would scream, wake my mom, worked every time.

"Anyway."

He leads us back to the SUV. "Okay, let's go, let's see." He's trim, has the square shoulders of an athlete, dressed in a blue blazer, striped shirt, khakis. All day he's had something specific mapped in his head, has not told us the itinerary. Back in Washington, he tells stories about Wilmington all the time, but the staff has never seen this stuff live. "You think I'm making it up, Shailagh, but I'm not."

Two cars lead the motorcade, and two trail it. We're in the center, in the silver SUV with bulletproof doors. Shailagh has graciously climbed into the way-back. The guy murmuring into the air up front is John, Biden's senior Secret Service guy. Spider, left, pull up to the stop sign. Biden calls him Johnny, considers him a pal. John pulls me aside. "So," he asks, "is this what you expected of the vice president of the United States?" Guys in this unit used to guard Cheney. "Night and day," is all one will say of it. "Night and day."

"A hundred yards, take another right," Biden says. His voice now in the car is low, a kind of purr. "My mom and my dad and my wife and my daughter are buried in this cemetery. Just stop at that stairwell here, okay? And we're going to get out here for just a second."

The rhododendrons are in bloom. It's a perfect May day. His house in Wilmington, where he and Jill and the kids spend weekends, is about ten minutes from here, down a long, wooded lane. "It says 'Tribute to the Irish powderman,' " he says, reading a stone carving. "All those Irish powdermen worked for DuPont, Shailagh. That's how the du Ponts made their money."

"Wow," Shailagh says.

"Powdermen," he says. There's a small church at the center of the graveyard. His church. All the kids' communions and confirmations. He loves the part about the Irish immigrants. He's an old-school devout Catholic, private. He's a dressed-up man who always wears a collar, does not understand T-shirts or sloppiness generally.

It gets to where he's made the point enough times that the tombstones in this section are old, really, really old; there are only so many ways of saying it.

"My mother, my father, my wife, and my daughter are buried there," he says again, pointing across the road to a completely different section of the cemetery. "That section. New section. Right there. You see where that truck is?"

We stand and look. It's maybe a football field away.

"Right there."

It's too far away. We can't see anything.

"Should we walk over?" I ask.

"It looks like there's a funeral about to come in. I don't want to disturb..."

But there is no funeral coming in. There is no activity over there whatsoever.

"We shouldn't," he says. His mother, his father, his wife, and his daughter. This is close enough. Close enough.

We stand for a moment longer, craning our necks, like civilians who can hear the bombs, see the smoke.

"The red maple? Just below the red maple. Everybody's there. Okay, let's get back in. Let's get back in."

I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America," he said one day at his residence in Washington. "But it doesn't mean I won't run." We were in the sunroom, which without explanation he called "the Cheney sunroom," as if the specter of the last guy who lived here had never quite vanished. The king of Jordan had just left; they had breakfast.

Every vice president since Mondale has lived up on this hill, on the twelve-acre campus of the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington. It's a pretty house with a wraparound porch and a white turret. In the garden, the aroma of boxwoods hung under the cover of mature magnolias. As living arrangements go, he said Barack and he both agree this place is way better than the White House. It was funny to hear him say "Barack." No one says "Barack." Then again, everyone says "Joe."

But about 2016: "The judgment I'll make is, first of all, am I still as full of as much energy as I have now—do I feel this?" he said. "Number two, do I think I'm the best person in the position to move the ball? And, you know, we'll see where the hell I am.

"And by the way, if you come in the office, I have two portraits hanging—one of Jefferson, one of Adams. Both vice presidents who became presidents." He said he likes to look at their very satisfied expressions. "I joke to myself, I wonder what their portraits looked like when they were vice presidents."

It was an intriguing image, and I wanted to ask him more about it, but there was no opening. Joe Biden does not pause. Points inside parentheticals, ideas emphatically chased. It's not that he fills up air like Romney might, or even tries to make a sale like Clinton. Biden's loquaciousness is more open than that. It's an athletic event.

"And I said, 'Why do you want me to be vice president?' " he told me, explaining that he never wanted the VP job, really he didn't, but Obama convinced him. "He said, 'Help me govern. Joe, you do Iraq. Defense, State—talk to Joe, get it done. Recovery Act, almost a trillion dollars, do it, Joe!'

"Not that I'm so special," he went on, "or that he couldn't do it as well or better. But guess what, there was a war in Afghanistan going on at the same time, a banking system collapsing. It was a boulder rolling down a hill here. No matter who he was, now matter how brilliant—this guy is brilliant—he doesn't have the space on his desk to pick up all of those pieces."

Co-captains, that's how he described his working relationship with Obama. Theirs is by all accounts a conjoined administration. At seven forty every morning, Obama's top advisers gather to set the day's agenda—together with other senior staff and Biden's top advisers, a blended, tangled family tree. Obama's press secretary used to be Biden's communications director. Biden's strategist is the brother of Obama's former national-security adviser; Biden's chief of staff co-authored a book with Obama's former chief of staff.

Ron Klain was Biden's chief of staff during his first term, and he saw how Biden changed up the job description compared with Al Gore, for whom Klain had also served as chief of staff. "From day one," Klain says, "Al Gore planned on running for president. The project was to ready him. If the president was doing a public event, he was going to stand behind the president whether he had a role or not.

"Biden didn't have any interest in that. That was not the model he wanted. He put his political capital on helping Obama succeed. He wanted projects. Beginning, middle, and end projects."

The deal has worked for Biden, and the deal has also worked for Obama. They round each other out. Biden can say malarkey. Biden can hug, literally, Republicans. "Joe Biden doesn't have a mean bone in his body," says John McCain. "He's unique from the day he was elected before he was 30 years old. He's unique in that he's had some role in every major national-security crisis that his nation has faced in the last thirty-five years. I don't know anyone like him in the U.S. Senate. Look at the number of times he's been able to conclude agreements. I would say he's been the most impactful vice president that I've known—certainly in modern times."

Not Cheney, McCain says. Biden.

"President Biden" does not sound preposterous to McCain. "Suppose the economy comes on strong. He's bound to get credit.... Of course, the State of the Union speech would be the longest in history."

Chuck Hagel is one of Biden's best friends. John Kerry is one of Biden's best friends. Lindsey Graham is almost one of Biden's best friends. "He's got a set of balls," Michael Bloomberg said of Biden, and if they spend any more time together, they will definitely become best friends. And then there is his roster of palace pals around the world. It would take a lifetime for someone to build an infrastructure of so much trust, so many avenues, in so many corners of the world. When an old man dies, the saying goes, a library burns to the ground. For Biden, it would be an entire global network.

In Wilmington, the guy driving the SUV in front of us stops abruptly, curls into a U-turn. "Ha!" Biden says. "This guy is so gosh darn bad. I love him, but he's gonna get us killed.

"Okay, take a left, keep going. This is what they call Holy Rosary. Where the bingo sign is? The carnival sign? Now it's closed down. It was consolidated with Saint Pius the Something. Okay, that was the Food Fair. The first supermarket. The first time I was ever in air-conditioning. Food Fair."

When we get to Archmere Academy, his high school, we stop and admire the fence. "I painted all this wrought iron. I really did. How I paid for tuition. Eighth-grade summer, ninth grade, tenth grade. We worked for a guy named Dominic. Dominic talked like this, 'Hey, Joe, get over here.' You think I'm joking, but I'm not."

The narrative is fast, tumbling, independent of audience reaction. He is talking to us, but he is talking to himself; with Biden the distinction is a mere technicality. We march through the campus as a group—Shailagh, Secret Service agents in rolling patterns, Biden's smile leading. As it happens, it's the last day of school at Archmere Academy, and no one knew the vice president of the United States was coming. Students, faculty, form a crowd around him in the courtyard, and Biden doesn't...transition. It's the same narrative, just a growing audience, his soft voice and mood rising. "We played in that gym, that's how ancient I am. I used to weed that garden. Hey, how you doing? I'm Joe Biden. I used to go to this school. That used to be more of a garden garden, now it's more open. This is the last day? Oh, you all look so stressed. Are you seniors? Well, good for you. That's the art building now? The art building! And by the way, when I came here, there were no girls."

The girls, maybe twenty of them, giggle, hold up their phones, and he pauses for pictures. He moves into the manor house, everyone following like fish swirling. "And I washed every window in this building," he says, reaching toward the stained-glass dome of the rotunda. "Most of the summer. I swear to God. With water and vinegar and paper." He spins, works all angles of the crowd. "My kids went here. My oldest son, he's the attorney general of the state of Delaware. We have a rugby team now? I want a picture! Ho ho ho, where's the White House photographer? And where's the class president? Can I have a class-president picture? Kate? Hello, Kate! I was class president, too, Kate! Folks, folks—"

The crowd obeys, falls to a hush. "Folks, when I was here at Archmere," he says, gathering attention. "One of the reasons I owe so much to Archmere, and by the way, I'm not joking. Don't laugh when I tell you how. You know, you never make fun of anybody with a club foot or a withered arm, but it's open season on anybody who stutters.

Without looking, he reaches out to Kate, the class president, grabs her hand.

"The most frightened I was. The hardest speech I ever had to make my whole life was my senior year, and all I had to do was introduce my family. And I was scared to death. Just, even now, thinking about it. 'Father Diny, parents, guests, I'd like to introduce to you my c—' And I almost couldn't say c-c-c-c—"

Kate is short, in a pretty flowered dress. She has her eyebrows up, leans forward as if to help.

"C-c-c-c-class," he says. "Of 1961. It literally was one of the turning points of my life that I was able to stand there. And it was because of the priest and nuns here at Archmere."

The students have put their phones down. No one expected the vice president of the United States to come, no one expected a speech on the last day of school.

He turns to Kate, leans down, kisses her forehead.

"Anyway, I'll get out of your hair."

He was, you know, made fun of," says his sister, Valerie Biden Owens. "One guy called him 'Dash,' signed the football to 'dash dash dash Biden,' because it was 'J-J-J-Joe Biden.' He worked hard. He practiced speaking. He learned cadence and rhythm. He memorized poems. He worked very hard."

Game it out. That's what he taught himself. Like, collecting money for the paper route. The people who answer the door are going to talk to you, and you have to say something back. He learned their interests, rehearsed at home. The guy in the red house? A Yankees man. Know the box scores. Practice. "Did you see Mantle hit two homers yesterday?" Memorize. Get the cadence. Did you see/Man-tle hit/two hom-ers/yes-ter-day. Practice.

Valerie was his best friend, constant companion, his kids' caretaker after Neilia, his first wife, died. Valerie ran his first campaign, his second, and every one after until he joined up with the Obama campaign. She remains his political alter ego. ("I do like to call myself Vice Sister.") She can inhabit her brother's brain. She was there when those fools mocked him. "My brother hates, hates, hates bullies," she says. "The man who pushed the girl. The guy who makes fun of you because you're fat.

"Joe never appeals to the lowest common denominator. Look what's happened in our political environment. If you don't agree with me, you're a bad person. You're immoral. You want to screw with me. You're bad, bad, bad. That's the climate. And Joe—never."

In those early campaign days, Biden and Val made it up as they went along. "Joe is the first senator that he and I ever met," she says. He was 28, not long out of law school (which was even more boring than college—he liked sports, he liked girls), and now he had a family, two boys, a baby girl on the way. He had become a county councilman more or less by accident, agreeing to help the party out. He became ignited by politics, got the idea to run for the U.S. Senate. It was 1971. Republican incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, hadn't lost a race since 1946. Polls the summer before the election had Biden trailing by thirty points.

And then he won.

"It was wild," says former senator Ted Kaufman, who helped with the campaign and would go on to be a lifelong adviser. "There is nothing I'll ever again believe is impossible.

"The big influx of new guys was '74. Gary Hart and Al Gore and all those guys. Joe Biden in '72 was the first of the new brand." Biden ran on civil rights, health care, withdrawal from Vietnam, the environment. Flash forward to the 1990s, Biden mixing it up with Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond to pass the chemical-weapons treaty, the crime bill.

"Now, after the fiscal cliff, everybody says, 'Oh yeah, this is something this guy is good at,' " Kaufman says. "But he's been doing that for years. For Joe, it all goes back to character—character coming from having really wonderful things happen to you, but also really awful things happen to you."

Kaufman remembers—everybody from back then remembers—when the call came. Just weeks after the miracle win over Boggs. A man couldn't soar any higher. Biden was in Washington, trying to figure out how to build a staff. Val was there. She took the call. Biden read her face. He knew every expression on his sister's face.

"She's dead, isn't she," he said.

A tractor trailer. His wife Neilia, dead. His baby Naomi, dead. Biden was sworn into the Senate in a hospital in Wilmington where his sons, Beau and Hunter, pulled from the wreckage, lay recovering.

Reality has a way of intruding," Biden said that day in the Cheney sunroom. "Reality eventually intrudes on everything." He didn't talk about the accident, any of that. That is not the way a man talks in Washington, D.C.

The leader of the free world. Now, there's an interesting topic. He said nowadays that job is way too complicated for one person alone to do, and so America is almost certainly better off with two. Obama and Joe. "Ideologically simpatico." That's the key. "Not like Bush-Cheney, where Bush is sort of a blank slate and Cheney was his imprint. Cheney made it hard for the government to function coherently."

He leaned forward, took a sip from a dainty white coffee cup. "Cheney's domain," he said, gesturing in the direction of the stairs. "Cheney had built up an entire apparatus. Sort of a separate National Security Council. I mean, up in the third floor, there's a room up there that is a secure—secure meaning it has a door you can lock—that's I'm told where Scooter Libby worked out of. There was a separate room over here that I turned into a child's bedroom that had a steel door on it that was the equivalent of the vice president's situation room, where he would hook up, sit here, and participate in the situation-room meetings."

The job of vice president is important, really it is, way more important than it used to be, but not in that fucked-up way Cheney made it important. I got the feeling Biden would have loved to say "fucked-up way Cheney made it important." But he didn't say that, not with all the tape recorders going, and the staffers there, and him in his breakfast-with-the-king-of-Jordan blue suit. Still, the uneasy expectation that he might say something like that is the thing, always the thing with Biden, the guy who trips and falls, gets back up, gets taken out, keeps getting back in.

He will say foolish things he doesn't quite mean, and he will say bluntly brilliant things that others long to say. "This is a big fucking deal," he whispered to Obama, as the president was about to sign the health-insurance-reform bill into law. Of course it was. Thank you, Joe. "Who do you love?" he said on Meet the Press. "Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?... Whether they're marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals." Of course. Thank you, Joe. He sparked the debate so many Americans wished Obama would have with that unscripted bit.

It's his charm. It's his gift. It's his political liability, and it's part of an American conundrum. We beg for authenticity, and then when we get it, oh man, it's hilarious. Biden can be fantastic when he's on his game. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, his speech got higher Nielsen ratings than either Bill Clinton's or Obama's. He killed the debate against Ryan, pumped air back into a campaign deflated after Obama's miserable first performance against Romney.

Watching those performances, it's almost impossible to see him as a person once crippled by speech.

"Humiliating," he said to me, when I asked about the stutter. "Degrading. And by the way, everybody's experienced something like that—"

Then, that day in the Cheney sunroom, it started happening. "W-w-w-when you t-t-t-talk like that—" he said. His face tilted. His eyebrows went up. Was it fake stuttering? Like back at the school? A demonstration? His chin appeared to lock in place, his lips nibbled without sound. The display was uncomfortably convincing. I wanted to check with the staff—does he do this often? Can he just call it up like this? But he had his eyes locked on mine. And looking away is exactly the thing anyone with any physical affliction is waiting for, waiting for you to flee, _to prove that this is so grotesque you can't even look at it. _

Nobody was fidgeting anymore. The room felt hot. "You c-c-c-can't approach," he said. "W-w-w-would you go to the p-p-p-prom with me?"

We go to a cheesesteak place for lunch. He tells me what to get, tells Shailagh what to get. "And you can both decide on your own toppings." He folds the trash when he's finished his food, folds the paper lining and the napkin precisely before discarding.

There is one more place. Maybe two. We'll have to see. In the interest of time. "No, you won't believe—" We climb back into the motorcade and go snaking through a heavily wooded neighborhood, old, tiny, colorful houses, narrow streets. "Just go straight here if you would, please. Look at this house on the right. Eclectic. Little hobbit houses. Like they were built with fairy dust! You know? You see?

"Neilia," he says. He and Neilia always wanted to buy a house here. Neilia, the first person outside of his family who believed in him. Neilia devised the strategy to help him not flunk out of law school. Neilia led him to see how huge his life could be. "My wife Neilia... My deceased wife, Neilia."

"Stop at this intersection, if you would. Dead-end street. So these guys may not want to go down here."

_Spider, hold, dead-end street. _

He climbs out of the SUV, takes off toward the woods, finds a deer path, blazes in without flinching, swatting vines, spiderwebs. He's still got his plastic Coke cup from lunch, the straw sticking out. "A step here. This used to be all clear here. My sister and I thought this was the enchanted forest." There's mud, wet leaves. Shailagh's in her pointed heels. He's in his tassel loafers. He doesn't care, doesn't notice. He's chasing ghosts in Wilmington, and there might be some more back here.

We get to the stream, wide, meandering around a jumble of boulders under the canopy of hardwoods, the sun piercing in patterns. It's picture-perfect, nothing to worry about but bugs. "Can you believe this?" he says, lifting his arms as if to say "Ta-dah!"

"Like a year-round summer camp, sir," John says.

"It was!" Biden says. "This used to be the dam, right here. It's all filled in now. You're looking at the pool, but it was four times as wide. You could dive off. The edge, it went all the way out here, you follow me? That's how wide it was! You follow me? It was that far over. Where these trees are? The most magical place in the world! Can you imagine? You're 13 years old? It was a fairy tale!"

"And by the way, Dr. Heinz, 300 pounds, he used to lie out there with his belly and just float. No raft, nothing. He would just float!"

What should I say about you that people don't know?" I ask him.

It's a foolish question, especially for Joe Biden, the guy who is about a Hillary Clinton away from the White House. He's just Joe. What you see is what you get.

But that is not what he says. Nor does he go charging athletically forth with a muscular show of words. It's the one time he answers with long stretches of silence.

"My entire career," he says. "I have never, ever, ever... Like the joke with Barack. Well, not a joke. But to make the point: When he offered me the job, I said, 'I'm not wearing any funny hats.'"

He doesn't wear funny hats. He is not the guy with the lampshade on his head. Listen, folks, he has no desire to put a fucking lampshade on his head. He is not that guy.

"People make jokes," I say.

"It's about ideas," he says, then stops himself. He's holding his aviators, twirling. It goes awkwardly on like this.

"I have read as much or know as much about foreign policy, domestic policy," he says. "Remember all that talk about the debate? How the other guy"—Paul Ryan—"was supposed to be the numbers guy and knew all the detail? Remember? Listen, I look forward to those kinds of things—"

He falls silent again. We pass a basketball court, kids playing.

"I never speak about anything I don't know a great deal about," he says. "That I haven't worked like hell for. But that's not what you'd expect. You might expect Clinton to do that.... Well, I shouldn't. I'm getting—" He looks out the window. He is not going to do this. He is not going to stoop or beg for respect.

I think about a speech Biden once gave, and about what it must feel like to live a life in which so many people don't get you, not really, fools keep mocking you, and you just get your nose back in your work. The speech was to a convention of the National Stuttering Association, and he was talking about how insidious the affliction is. "Insidious," he said. He talked about never believing the people who think they have you figured out. Never believing them—that was the good fight. "The rationales other people apply as to why we stutter," he said. "We're slow. We don't have confidence. We don't have any strength. We're just not very bright."

This again is the thing. The thing that has plagued him his whole life, the thing that keeps the presidency out of reach, this again and again is the thing. Vice fucking president of the United States, sitting here twirling his glasses, having to defend the depth of his own intellect.

"I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds here," says John, in the front seat. It's the first time he's stepped in like this. It feels like a rescue, a guy taking a bullet. Lay off my boss. "Quick little story. We stopped at Dunkin' Donuts. A man comes up. 'Joe, you gotta come see my wife, she's really ill.' A small little house there. Hospital bed in the living room, her deathbed. No air-conditioning. And the vice president told a staff person, 'Hey, let's make sure we get an A/C unit here.' I was like, wow. That's Vice President Joe Biden."

"That's nice of you to say, Johnny," Biden says to him, even though the story is sort of off-topic. "And by the way, we bought her some doughnuts."

I ask him what he meant when he said it's about "ideas," and he gives it one last go.

"There's a sense that there's an inconsistency in being able to relate to people personally and being...innovative," he says. "Being very...substantively informed. Put it that way." He throws his head back with a tiny laugh of surrender. "Ha." He is not going to do this.

You can't be a compassionate man, a guy without a mean bone in his body, and also a brilliant man. The public doesn't have room for that—at least not in Joe Biden. He mentions a famous world leader. He won't say who, but it could have been any number of leaders from any number of countries across the globe—Karzai, Medvedev, Netanyahu—a moment, one of a million moments in a political career spanning four decades. "We were trying to get a world leader to refrain from doing something. He came to Washington, and it was a big deal. Most people thought that if he had done what he was going to do, it would have caused a war to break out." Send in Joe Biden. Arm around the world leader. Talk to the world leader. Soft voice, a few easy laughs, show some Joe Biden empathy to the world leader. "And I convinced him to forgo it and do something else," he says. No big deal. It's what he does. Save a country or two from some miserable war. To the extent that all politics is personal, Joe Biden is the historic monument. "And I walked out, and a guy was there, a senior staff guy at the State Department, and he said, 'You know, Mr. Vice President, you didn't realize it, but that was diplomacy!'"

He looks at me, straightens his back, offers an unmistakable WTF blink.